Scantlings

Just out of curiosity, has anyone here whose first language is English tried to learn some Mandarin? Any helpful hints?

Tigger wrote:Just out of curiosity, has anyone here whose first language is English tried to learn some Mandarin? Any helpful hints?

I took it in High School.
That was more than 50 years ago.
I remember some of the swear words.

你要學中文嗎？ I’ve spoken it since I was a teenager and most of my career was in Mandarin speaking countries. I read and write and if the lights are out, people think I’m Taiwanese.

I chose it because I hated French.

他媽的PO兩次！

I've always thought the Asian Pacific languages to be incredibly complex. I can't imagine trying to pick it up as an older adult whose thought processes are fairly set in concrete.
The written language is like art.

There’s no agreement and no conjugation and no tenses - so grammar is simple. Pronunciation is a challenge with tones and it’s a contextual language, so words mean different things in different contexts; you have to know what you’re talking about to know what your talking about. Writing is just brute force memorization and repetition. Organization of Data is not so great - imagine if at the front of a dictionary they started with “hard to find words” because it goes by stroke count and “radical” - kind of a building block of a character. Also, very traditionally Chinese reads right to left, but more modern goes left to right - so looking at a double row sign you need to figure out if it’s going top-down left to right or right to left in columns or rows. Again, helps to know what you’re looking at.

Still easier than the simple past or subjunctive in French.

you have to know what you’re talking about to know what your talking about.

Love it. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, even when I know what the hell I'm talking about!

Ajax, I only know a few phrases and only verbally. For me I could only learn those phrases when I stopped trying to think in words and started mapping the phrase to a piece of music.

EG: "Thank you" == "Lala La" and "Where is the men's room" is == "La laLala La La"

It turns out that some of us remember tonal patterns better than we do sentences constructed from words. In Mandarin this seems to work better for me but I'm still basically a language-cripple.

BeauV wrote:Ajax, I only know a few phrases and only verbally. For me I could only learn those phrases when I stopped trying to think in words and started mapping the phrase to a piece of music.

EG: "Thank you" == "Lala La" and "Where is the men's room" is == "La laLala La La"

It turns out that some of us remember tonal patterns better than we do sentences constructed from words. In Mandarin this seems to work better for me but I'm still basically a language-cripple.

Adele and I were just talking to Beau and Stacey about this last night. In person over dinner!

Somehow we forgot to get a picture. Will have to get one today.

Adele and Beau on Mayan. Gorgeous boat with so many great stories and many more to come. Breathtakingly beautiful. Beau’s done some amazing things to make her more practical with no sacrifices to preservation.

Beau, thanks again for hosting us aboard. I’ll post some more pics when we get back home.

That's very cool, thanks for posting the photo!

Ass far ass contextual language is concerned, eye wood imagine the shear amount of homonyms inn English too bee sum watt daunting too a nun English speaker.

Tim Ford wrote:That's very cool, thanks for posting the photo!

Ass far ass contextual language is concerned, eye wood imagine the shear amount of homonyms inn English too bee sum watt daunting too a nun English speaker.

What I hear it's our messed up grammar, but what you say is a fair thing to say about our fair language. Partially because of 5 thousand years of political repression, homonyms, homophones, puns, and sly allusions have been raised to a high art in most Chinese dialects. For example: river crab -> harmonize -> censored.

Tim Ford wrote:That's very cool, thanks for posting the photo!

Ass far ass contextual language is concerned, eye wood imagine the shear amount of homonyms inn English too bee sum watt daunting too a nun English speaker.

If you include Cockney, Liverpool, Appalachian, and LA black slang in "English" then there is simply no hope for anyone learning our language.

True, but:
- We don't have mutually incomprehensible dialects that use the same, "words". Hmmm... after watching The Wire, maybe that's not true.
- We have fewer words that change pronunciation based on usage.
- We don't have simplified and traditional versions of the same words. Some simplified words aren't PRC inventions, but are traditional simplified.
- We don't have a "classical" form of the language that uses different grammar and words. One way to make your writing sound more formal and educated is to use more classical construction and words.
- We don't have situations where 99% of the time a word or an allusion means, "X", unless in this case we are referring to this other poem, which in that case it means "Y". Of course, if you didn't read the other poem, or know what the author was trying to get at, you wouldn't know that. Think barriers to being a "scholar".
- Loan words are sometimes phonetic, sometimes by meaning, sometimes when the scholar was clever, both. However phonetic depended upon the dialect that the loan word entered into the language. For example Ice cream makes zero sense in Mandarin, neither phonetic nor meaning, but is OK in Canto because that's who translated it first. The city Athens sound silly in Mandarin, but OK in Fujianese, because of a certain scholar in Xiamen was the first person to officially translate it.
- We don't need to know 500-1000 words to read a newspaper.

Ok, I'll stop boring you all...

Ok ok ok I surender!

In English, we do have many pairs of words that are synonyms, one derived from Romance languages (mostly French) and one derived from Anglo-Saxon. The Romance version is always considered more refined and polite.

The folks at Language Log often discuss idiosyncrasies of Chinese languages. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ Mostly, I don't have the background to understand, but one point they cover frequently is that written Chinese is a mess, and getting messier as it borrows more and more from western languages.

One thing that I read at Language Log a while ago brought me up short. Someone said that English does not have a future tense. So, you can say, I run and I ran, but for the future you have to use a helper word to make I will run rather than using a form of the verb to run by itself.

SemiSalt wrote:In English, we do have many pairs of words that are synonyms, one derived from Romance languages (mostly French) and one derived from Anglo-Saxon. The Romance version is always considered more refined and polite.

The folks at Language Log often discuss idiosyncrasies of Chinese languages. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ Mostly, I don't have the background to understand, but one point they cover frequently is that written Chinese is a mess, and getting messier as it borrows more and more from western languages.

One thing that I read at Language Log a while ago brought me up short. Someone said that English does not have a future tense. So, you can say, I run and I ran, but for the future you have to use a helper word to make I will run rather than using a form of the verb to run by itself.

English also lacks an infinitive. We have to add “to.”

Poor Tigger, I'm not sure we gave him a whole lot of encouragement.

Here are Beau and I. You might mistake us for Crosby and Stills but we're both bass players!



Mayan's gorgeous cockpit. That cool bronze dorade box that houses the mainsheet winch motor already has a nice patina.

Tim Ford wrote:Poor Tigger, I'm not sure we gave him a whole lot of encouragement.

Clearly he's not come back to see what' he's created. Or of he has, he's avoiding it.

Keith has the rock star shades thing going, maybe he really IS a rock star and only pretends to be a stock picker.

It was great hosting Keith and his lovely daughter Adele aboard MAYAN. They timed the weather perfectly, showing up for the first big storm of the season just as some of the biggest waves in years hit the coast. It made the views from shore astounding. Then everything cleared up and we had bluebird skies.

Being sailors, Adele and Keith were understanding of the boxes of epoxy and varnish sitting around the main saloon. Thank you!

My lovely Admiral enjoyed my report of Adele’s comment: “Wow, throw pillows! How wonderful. Dad....” (I’m not getting it exactly right, but Keith may have some throw pillows aboard in the future.

Keith, the pillows get stowed someplace where they can’t escape in heavy weather as they play hell with foot traffic below. Thank you for coming over to our little town.

Beau, we really enjoyed it. When we got home Adele told her mom how much she liked you guys, especially Stacey (fellow females, I imagine--don't take it personally ).

I'll do anything for Adele, even get some girly throw pillows. I never doubted that your pillows have appropriate stowage for Mayan's "man den" mode.

We had some fun biking around and doing some shopping after we left you. I got some rad board shorts to bring home to New England. Adele got a good run in on the beach and then we got some pool and spa time. We enjoyed our time there. I wish I had taken more pictures of the Dream Inn to show Ann.

kdh wrote:Beau, we really enjoyed it. When we got home Adele told her mom how much she liked you guys, especially Stacey (fellow females, I imagine--don't take it personally ).

I'll do anything for Adele, even get some girly throw pillows. I never doubted that your pillows have appropriate stowage for Mayan's "man den" mode.

We had some fun biking around and doing some shopping after we left you. I got some rad board shorts to bring home to New England. Adele got a good run in on the beach and then we got some pool and spa time. We enjoyed our time there. I wish I had taken more pictures of the Dream Inn to show Ann.

Plenty of pics of the Dream Inn on-line, just google images. Of course they are during the summer, but there is one there of a suite with a fireplace - one of Stacey and my favorite rooms from long ago.

It was great having you around. Come back soon (summers are better )

Tim Ford wrote:Poor Tigger, I'm not sure we gave him a whole lot of encouragement.

Tigger is highly amused at thread drift!

I also asked two friends with one foot in each language--both emigrated to Canada as youngsters and spoke Mandarin at home. Somewhat surprisingly, to me anyway, neither had any great insights on how to go about it.

Tigger wrote:

Tim Ford wrote:Poor Tigger, I'm not sure we gave him a whole lot of encouragement.

Tigger is highly amused at thread drift!

I also asked two friends with one foot in each language--both emigrated to Canada as youngsters and spoke Mandarin at home. Somewhat surprisingly, to me anyway, neither had any great insights on how to go about it.

Native speakers, or even semi-native speakers of any language are usually a poor choice as they language just came to them; ie they had the daily practice for fluency and a bit of formal education.

Start with pronunciation and practices tones. My first teacher wouldn't let me see a textbook other than learn the Taiwanese ㄅㄆㄇㄈ phonetic symbols and each tone for the first 3 months. I hated it, but it made all the difference later. ㄅ first tone, second tone, third tone, fourth tone, neutral tone. Rinse and repeat for all 36 or so symbols and however many conjunctions. Then sign up for the Mandarin Daily News - which is a newspaper for kids. Or you could go the pinyin and simplified characters way.

My way is the old way - worked for me - but maybe not the popular way today.

Thanks Jamie. Is the process of learning the tones someone one could learn (even if only partially) from an ap while commuting?

Tigger wrote:Thanks Jamie. Is the process of learning the tones someone one could learn (even if only partially) from an ap while commuting?

If alone in a car....otherwise you might be called in. But, it really helps to have someone correct you, especially when dealing with things like third tones.